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Going Sane is not a book about psychoanalysis, but like all of Adam Phillips' books it tells us something about the current state of play of psychoanalysis. Thinking about what it would be like to be sane, what being sane might feel like for us today, Phillips reworks the initial Freudian principles of mind with reference to war. Far from a gratuitous reading of the history of psychoanalysis, Phillips' argument engages the very horizon of Freudian thought. He recounts a trajectory in Freud's own thinking where the polarity of pleasure and reality held good until, faced among other things with the phenomenon of repetitive traumatic dreams at the time of the First World War, Freud sought to account for our non-erotic aggression and hatred in terms of the death drive. The upheaval caused by the introduction of the latter remains part of Freud's difficult legacy: for the alternation of the pleasure principle and the reality principle, as Freud describes it, is incommensurable with his account of the conflict between Eros and death.
What does Phillips (1998) make of this difficulty? The short answer is that he refuses to settle for the pessimistic hypothesis of the death drive. In The Beast in the Nursery, he already takes issue with the idea that a person's life is a war between life and death instincts. The present book augments this line of thinking by reworking Freud's ideas of pleasure and reality as a composite principle of sane kindness. On this reading, sanity is neither the alternative of madness nor a synonym of reality. Instead, Phillips describes a relationship of forces in which the gratification of our libidinous and aggressive impulses is coupled with the aspiration of kindness. Whereas Freud emphasizes the internalization of parental prohibitions and demands, Phillips ventures beyond the theme of interdiction in search of “a new story about kindness” (2005, p 238). The book envisages the sane life beyond the “humiliating morality” of our sense of goodness